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1.

Are we still here?

Are we there yet?

NO.    WE ARE OUTSIDE  LAST NIGHT  MAKING NOTES

The night after I return home from Mexicali I light my first fire in the little asador (barbecue) out front that used to be full of potted plants for two or three years when Eli and Marta lived here until last week. It was so full of her plants that I didn't ever know, even in the twenty-two months I lived here, I didn't know that it be a fireplace, not a planter. Only when all her plants were gone, and the concrete shelves stripped bare, and their car no longer parked in front of it (yes, that too, blocked my view across time and space) only now did I see the metal grill, and recognize that common implement, the piece of typical Mexican outdoor architecture and reality of life: the asador barbecue wood and charcoal stove, built up into the wall.

¡Viva México! I write beside the little fire in my notebook, flames, words, smoke in my nose, etcet mixed metaphor burning my pages in ink while the wood crackles softly in the wind and I watch carefully to make sure no flaming brands sail off through the breeze, no. It's a little fire, but fire is still dangerous, especially in this wind we've been having that knocked down power lines and towers and billboards and shut down roads while I was gone yesterday and the day before to Mexicali when we were gone the Santa Ana winds came but it was all tranquil over on the other side in the desert, while in the mountains the winds ripped and fell down upon the crowded coast valleys and hills whoosh whoooo crash, no, I must watch the fire closely, closely. It's only a little fire I built from wood trash I found across the street in the junk pile of rubbish cast away there at the backside of a parking lot fence no one ever cleans the weeds of dirt space that "should" be a sidewalk between the curb and the tall metal security fence. The cars in that lot all go in and out at the far end on the other street Sor Juana de la Cruz you can't get there from here except on foot the linking passage is pedestrian only sidewalk that's how I walk to the border gate five minutes – five New York minutes, only one or two Mexican seconds lingering and walking and no cars come and go from that lot on this side.

There was a burnt out Christmas tree abandoned over there in the rubbish. The wooden cross-beam stand was all charred and toasted dry it crackles in my little fireplace outside in front of the house I sit in the big open cement space and wonder who will move in next to this lovely little house where I live in back. There's a guy with his wife and two kids down the street they have their eye on the place. Good people I like them. He speaks English.

There may not be many nights with chances for me to make a fire and sit all alone in the night saying good evening to the neighbors as they walk by and I intend to stake my claim to these moments of flickering campfire in the midst of city, burning rubbish wood for an hour or two in the late winter evening yes.

Maybe tomorrow (today, tonight) I'll burn the charred skinny tree trunk.

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